“If someone had asked me, I would have changed nothing, nothing at all, I would have wanted to be born here, in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea.”

This is the story of a peninsula and the seas that surround it; it is the story of a diverse people with thousands of years of traditions, a deep respect for the land and the sea, and a special care for all the creatures that live there. It is the story of a guardian: a keeper of the sea, not merely a lighthouse.

On the occasion of the Amerigo Vespucci Training Ship cruising around the World, the Ministry of Environment and Energy Security (MASE) was in need of telling the story of Italy's commitment to protecting marine and coastal habitats.

It was crucial to create an impactful narrative, capable of overcoming language barriers and communicating mostly through the power of images. To achieve this goal, we came up with the concept of an elderly “Guardian of the Sea” - a symbol of the wisdom and experience of those who have known and cared for the sea all their lives - flanked by a little girl, a symbol of the future and of the new environmentally conscious generations. The wise man shows the little girl the unique beauty of Italy's coastline and its seas, teaching her the importance of marine conservation through the senses and inspiring her curiosity.

After an early phase of concept and storyboard writing, the team flew to Puglia for filming and shooting. The region was selected for the amazing array of very different evocative places, able to offer foreign audiences small samples of the Italian coastal landscape.

The result: five video episodes and an opening video spot, featuring a new storytelling, far from the classic documentary language, capable of immersing the international viewer in the Italian coastal environment and, at the same time, highlighting the country's commitment to the preservation and recovery of the peninsula's marine habitats.

The video editing is enriched with scenes from the video materials of the Ministry of the Environment and Energy Security (MASE), the Superior Institute for Environmental Protection and Research (ISPRA) and the Italian Navy. These materials were also used to create five additional videos with a documentary slant, offering international users the opportunity to delve deeper into the topics covered through more technical concepts and infographics that facilitate understanding of the information.